Mehdi Belhaj Kacem on Tristan Garcia

The young French-Tunisian philosopher, novelist, and actor has written what looks like a remarkable 54-page open letter to the even younger Tristan Garcia on his book Forme et objet. (Hat tip, Alex Galloway.)

It’s been a busy day for me and so I’ve only had a chance to skim it so far, but the upshot is that the author thinks the current period in philosophy is the most interesting since 1965-70.

I was of course there to watch when speculative realism drew a lot of attention, but if anything, Garcia’s book seems to be stirring up even more high-profile interest.

Here are some things to really like about Garcia: he’s put his cards on the table by risking a full-blown system of philosophy very early in his career; he writes wonderfully; he reads omnivorously, including in the analytic philosophy tradition; he’s remarkably prolific and simply goes right to the point as quickly as he can rather than pondering over things for years, as many of us are otherwise tempted to do (I always assumed that writing a big systematic book was something to aim at past age 50, but Garcia just goes and does it, and with a great deal of success).

Anyway, as far as I can determine, Belhaj Kacem’s piece does not seem to be online anywhere, but the details are as follows:

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, “Lettre à Tristan Garcia,” La revue littéraire, 52, pp.111-165.

That will help you get it through interlibrary loan if you’re interested.

One of the reasons Garcia’s book is a potential game-changer is because he puts objects at the forefront at a moment when that seemed unlikely to happen in post-Badiouian French thought.

As you might guess, I’m quite happy about that. Garcia does it rather differently from what you’ve seen from American OOO so far (among other things, his referent is Meinong rather than Husserl and Heidegger as you’ll get from my version).

Garcia, who seems to have almost limitless ammunition at his disposal for his intellectual work, has already written a 3-page summary of his similarities and differences vis-à-vis my position that is better than anything I can come up with on the fly in a blog post. The major differences? I find him a bit too committed to flat ontology, which for me is a temporary starting point rather than something needs to be built into the foundation of an ontology. As a result, his “things” seem to me more featureless than necessary (he does this because he needs the category of the “n’importe quoi” to induce total initial flatness, and anything with specific qualities of any kind cannot be a “no matter what it is” in this sense). And in turn, since he identifies the specific qualities of objects (which, as opposed to Garcia’s “things,” do have specific qualities) with their relations of including or being included by other objects, he ends up with an ontology that is too relational. That is to say, insofar as he defines objects as the difference between their component parts and the effects they have on other things, the autonomy of the object is eroded in both directions. Change the constitutive components of a chair or change the chair’s position in the room, and in either case the chair is not the same chair.

But these are simply the sorts of debates one expects in philosophy, and the debates evolve over time into more refined form. There is plenty of room for many plants in the greenhouse, and Garcia is one of the most promising plants.

It’ll take a little while for the whole of Forme et objet to appear in English, but maybe we ought to start insisting that some of his lectures and essays head rapidly in our native language.